Please pay for the news; we like to eat

By: 
Warren Bluhm
Editor-in-chief

Back in olden times when the internet was still fresh and new, the average newspaper put up a website and shared all its stories online for free. The thinking, I think, was that the web was a promotional tool, another incentive for people to go out and buy a paper, where you didn’t have to do all that clicking and scrolling to read all the stories.

In those halcyon days once upon a time, businesses bought ads and people bought classifieds in the paper to advertise everything from houses to rummage sales. They also bought newspapers at the store, or better yet they bought subscriptions so the paper arrived at their door more or less automatically. So newspaper owners figured they didn’t need to make money on their websites.

Then Craigslist came and you didn’t have to buy a classified ad to sell Mom’s old china or advertise your rummage sale. Big businesses started selling their stuff on websites, and then Facebook and the like made it easier for smaller businesses to get into that act. People bought fewer newspapers because they figured the news was all free online anyway.

As newspaper ad revenues and sales dropped, they had fewer dollars to pay the help with, and the phrase “doing more with less” started creeping into their vocabulary.

As the staff reductions started cutting into bone, newspapers started thinking, heck, why did we put this stuff online for free when we were asking 50-75 cents or $1 to buy the same stuff on newsprint? So the digital subscription was invented, so the papers could pay the overworked and underpaid reporters who were still hanging on and telling their towns’ stories.

That in a nutshell is the story of why NEW Media (stalwart publisher of the Shawano Leader, Oconto County Times Herald, and Wittenberg Enterprise and Birnamwood News) changed its website a couple of years ago to make it available to paid subscribers only. We still need to pay the bills, and we still need to eat, and so do the staff members who are doing the job that twice as many people did a decade or two ago.

Not all readers are happy about this. I can’t blame them. When something has been free for a long time and suddenly it isn’t, resistance is understandable. It’s like when people were downloading songs off Napster for free and suddenly the music industry came along and said, “Musicians need to eat, too, please give us 99 cents a song instead of nothing.”

So we’ve seen a handful of people, and in some cases more than a handful, work their way around the price of entry to newmedia-wi.com — said price being as little as (coincidentally enough) 99 cents a day.

Folks have shared their user name and password with dozens of friends. Others have copied our stories and pasted them on social media.

I can’t blame you. Heck, it annoys me when I click on a story and discover I have to pay something if I really want to read it. If someone offered up the same article for free, I’d probably sneak a peek, too, if I wanted to read it badly enough.

When one of our stories is shared for free, it’s gratifying to see dozens of friends saying “thanks for sharing!” and congratulating the story subject and the like. It’s proof that we had a good idea when we decided to cover and share those local news and sports stories.

I just want you to realize that we charge for those articles for a reason: We need the money to survive as a business. It’s not exactly like shoplifting, but it’s a first cousin of it — You tucked something into your pocket that was meant to be for sale, something that the store owner was hoping would help pay the rent and meet payroll.

If enough folks do that, eventually the store owner can’t pay the rent or the help, and she has to close up shop. We’re nowhere near that point, but we’d like to stay that way.

Please, just pay the 99 cents, or a little more to buy a subscription, rather than read it for free courtesy of your friend. We’d like to keep bringing those stories to you while making a modest living that pays the bills and feeds our families. In the end, that’s all the digital subscription is about.


Warren Bluhm is the editor-in-chief for NEW Media. Readers can contact him at wbluhm@newmedia-wi.com.